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.Net On Android Is Safe, Says Microsoft
An anonymous reader writes "With Oracle suing Google over 'unofficial' support for Java in Android, Microsoft has come out and said it has no intention of taking action against the Mono implementation of C# on the Linux-based mobile OS. That's good news for Novell, which is in the final stages of preparing MonoDroid for release. Miguel de Icaza is not concerned about legal challenges by Microsoft over .Net implementations, and even recommends that Google switch from using Java. However, Microsoft's Community Promise has been criticized by the Free Software Foundation for not going far enough to protect open source implementations from patent litigation, which is at the heart of the Oracle-Google case."
Maybe it's another TRAP!
I would have been then the first one if i hadn't to install Net Framework for Android.
Unbelievable!
I, for one, would avoid using the terms ".NET" and "safe" in the same paragraph. I realize they are talking about safe from patent trollage, but it implies that someone would actually want to, you know, actually USE .net or Mono by choice.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
MonoDroid will be a commercial product licensed in a similar fashion to our Mono for iPhone product MonoTouch.
They really need a better naming theme.
The liberals got it exactly right. For years now they’ve been telling us how “vibrant” mass immigration has made stale, pale White societies. Well, London was certainly vibrating on 7th July and that got me thinking: What else have the liberals got right? Mass immigration “enriches” us too, they’ve always said. Is that “enrich” as in “enriched uranium”, an excellent way of making atom bombs? Because that’s what comes next: a weapon of real mass destruction that won’t kill people in piffling dozens but in hundreds of thousands or millions. Bye-bye London, bye-bye Washington, bye-bye Tel Aviv.
I’m not too sure I’d shed a tear if the last-named went up in a shower of radioactive cinders, but Tel Aviv is actually the least likely of the three to be hit. What’s good for you ain’t good for Jews, and though Jews have striven mightily, and mighty successfully, to turn White nations into multi-racial fever-swamps, mass immigration has passed the Muzzerland safely by. And mass immigration is the key to what happened in London. You don’t need a sophisticated socio-political analysis taking in Iraq, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Jewish control of Anglo-American foreign policy, British colonialism, and fifteen centuries of Christian-Muslim conflict. You can explain the London bombs in five simple words:
Pakis do not belong here.
And you can sum up how to prevent further London bombs – and worse – in three simple words:
PAKI GO HOME.
At any time before the 1950s, brown-skinned Muslim terrorists would have found it nearly impossible to plan and commit atrocities on British soil, because they would have stood out like sore thumbs in Britain’s overwhelmingly White cities. Today, thanks to decades of mass immigration, it’s often Whites who stand out like sore thumbs. Our cities swarm with non-whites full of anti-White grievances and hatreds created by Judeo-liberal propaganda. And let’s forget the hot air about how potential terrorists and terrorist sympathizers are a “tiny minority” of Britain’s vibrant, peace-loving Muslim “community”.
Even if that’s true, a tiny minority of 1.6 million (2001 estimate) is a hell of a lot of people, and there’s very good reason to believe it isn’t true. Tony Blair has tried to buy off Britain’s corrupt and greedy “moderate” Muslims with knighthoods and public flattery, but his rhetoric about the “religion of peace” wore thin long ago. After the bombings he vowed, with his trademark bad actor’s pauses, that we will... not rest until... the guilty men are identified... and as far... as is humanly possible... brought to justice for this... this murderous carnage... of the innocent.
His slimy lawyer’s get-out clause – “as far as is humanly possible” – was soon needed. Unlike Blair and his pal Dubya in Iraq and Afghanistan, the bombers were prepared not only to kill the innocent but to die themselves as they did so. And to laugh at the prospect: they were captured on CCTV sharing a joke about the limbs and heads that would shortly be flying. Even someone as dim as Blair must know you’ve got a big problem on your hands when there are over 1.6 million people in your country following a religion like that.
If he doesn’t know, there are plenty of Jewish journalists who will point it out for him. There’s the neo-conservative Melanie Phillips in Britain, for example, who never met an indignant adverb she didn’t like, and the neo-conservative Mark Steyn in Canada, who never met an indignant Arab he didn’t kick. Reading their hard-hitting columns on Muslim psychosis, I was reminded of a famous scene in Charles Dickens’ notoriously anti-Semitic novel Oliver Twist (1839). The hero watches the training of the villainous old Jew Fagin put into action by the Artful Dodger:
What was Oliver’s h
.Net doesn't work on Windows operating systems. Why expect it to work on Android?
Microsoft has had such a failure of Windows Mobile that not pressing there luck with Android might be the only way they can keep people potentially developing on C#. Lets consider C# is a poor Microsoft Excuse for merging Java and C++ and is as stable on a Windows platform as most poorly coded Java Apps. If Microsoft were to push for a suit Google would laugh and say sure we'll remove it we put it there to pity you.
Some of the Oracle patents relate to Virtual Machines in general and not just the JVM. So how can Mono be safe from Oracle?
Although I generally believe that the less said about Beck-Gingrich, the better, I do feel obligated to say a few things about Beck-Gingrich's unreasonable equivocations. In the text that follows, I don't intend to recount all of the damage caused by Beck-Gingrich's sinful, contemptible catch-phrases but I do want to point out that it is hardly surprising that Beck-Gingrich wants to attack the fabric of this nation. After all, this is the same egocentric coward whose officious prattle informed us that mediocrity is a worthwhile goal. I have not forgotten that he can't relate to anyone other than unsophisticated marauders. I have not forgotten that his belief systems are so irascible, so featherbrained, so postmodernist that there are really no earth words to describe exactly how I feel about them. And I cannot forget that my goal is to contribute to the intellectual and spiritual health of the body politic. I will not stint in my labor in this direction. When I have succeeded, the whole world will know that I find that some of Beck-Gingrich's choices of words in his witticisms would not have been mine. For example, I would have substituted "nerdy" for "philosophicojuristic" and "barbaric" for "saccharomucilaginous."
I must emphasize that Beck-Gingrich frequently plays on our emotions. An obvious parallel from a different context is that I'll tell you what we need to do about all the craziness he is mongering. We need to deal summarily with closed-minded, testy clods. We should agree on definitions before saying anything further about his ill-tempered fulminations. For starters, let's say that "resistentialism" is "that which makes Beck-Gingrich yearn to preach fear and ignorance."
We must balkanize Beck-Gingrich's deranged terrorist organization into an etiolated and sapless agglomeration. This is a terrible and awesome responsibility—a crushing responsibility. However, if we stick together we can can show the world that if Beck-Gingrich were as bright as he thinks he is, he'd know that it's his belief that my letters demonstrate a desire to make nearby communities victims of environmental degradation and toxic waste dumping. I can't understand how anyone could go from anything I ever wrote to such an impertinent idea. In fact, my letters generally make the diametrically opposite claim, that Beck-Gingrich insists that he has no choice but to break down our communities. His reasoning is that a plausible excuse is a satisfactory substitute for performance. Yes, I realize that that argument makes no sense, but I realize that the tone of this letter may be making some people feel uneasy. However, even if you're somewhat uncomfortable reading about Beck-Gingrich's untoward disquisitions please don't blame me for them. I'm not the one depriving individuals of the right to preserve the peace. I'm not the one draining our hope and enthusiasm. And I'm not the one deluding and often robbing those rendered vulnerable and susceptible to his snares because of poverty, illness, or ignorance.
Something recently occurred to me that might occur to Beck-Gingrich, as well, if he would just turn down the volume of his voice for a moment: If history follows its course, it should be evident that the gloss that Beck-Gingrich's buddies put on Beck-Gingrich's false-flag operations unfortunately does little to get my message about Beck-Gingrich out to the world. I wish I didn't have to be the one to break the news that our attempts to present another paradigm in opposition to his short-sighted ravings have so far served only as a divertissement for him and his deputies, who are legion. Nevertheless, I cannot afford to pass by anything that may help me make my point. So let me just state that trying to fill our children's minds with spleeny and debasing superstitions is just as overweening as trying to give lunatics control of the asylum. Sadly, lack of space prevents me from elaborating further.
I've repeatedly pointed out to Beck-Gingrich that he should have been removed from the gene pool before he had a chance
Almost every single company that has had dealings with Microsoft has been stabbed in the back by them...
IBM : OS/2
Stacker : Doublespace
Spyglass : Mosaic
Sun : Java
Everyone : plays4sure (DRM servers shut down leaving purchases useless)
Go : Mobile technology (at least I think the company was called Go)
Caldera : DR-DOS
Novell : Wordperfect
How many times does this have to happen before people see a pattern and avoid partnering with Microsoft? The bigger players can survive the knife between the shoulderblades... the smaller players *if they eventually get a payoff* still usually end up dead anyway.
It is always nice to be reminded that there is at least one regard (immigration) in which European conservatives are actually worse than our own American conservatives.
If they are just "porting" then I'd have expected that .net would sit atop Dalvik ... which would make the entire project just as "tainted" under the Oracle theory.
Or is this going to be "raw" bypassing anything that Google neglected to ensure rights to use?
.Net has been around for years and years, Mono has been around for almost as long, and there's been no lawsuit, so Microsoft has no interest or intention of suing, right? I'm not convinced. The way I always figured it, if you're going to sue for something like that, you wait till the 'unofficial' platform has become wildly popular and it's largely too late to 'turn the ship', so to speak, then you sue.
Microsoft's problem with .Net and Mono is that while it's become used somewhat, it hasn't really become used to the extent that, say, Java on Android (where every Android phone has the Dalvik VM and nearly every app is written in Java). Mono exists on Linux/Mac/*BSD, but mostly people don't use it that much, in my experience (I'm sure someone somewhere has a story about how there company has a mission critical app built on Mono, running on Linux or whatever platform, but I just don't see most Linux distro's deploying many Mono apps by default, and I don't see any widely-used 'killer apps' that are built on Mono).
Basically, .Net/Mono never reached the point of deployment and mission critical-ness to warrant a lawsuit, because MS would likely get small-time damages right now. Gotta wait till the damages are worth the bad PR (which may never come in .Net's case).
If you are a dedicated .net developer looking to make mobile apps, this makes the android platform really appealing.
.net app development. Who'd have thought it?
Mono touch on iphone still requires a paid account, and suffers from an uncertain future. Windows phone only has silverlight and xna options. I don't know much about silverlight really, but i have little interest in learning it, and xna is pretty low level if you intend to make forms type things. Android is like this happy place of unencumbered
I don't know for sure, but Google, about 6 months after the original Android/G1 release, made a native SDK available. I imagine that for something like Mono, you would create a native executable JIT compiler/runtime (which is how you do .Net on any other platform). Or, perhaps, your mono code will be cross-compiled to a native Android/ARM binary program which does not require a separate Mono runtime to be installed on end-user phones.
Interesting thing about MonoDroid is that while all the other incarnations of Mono are Open Source, MonoDroid apparently will not be. An interesting choice for Novell, I'd say.
From the FAQ:
How much will MonoDroid Cost?
We have not yet announced the pricing for MonoDroid, but you should anticipate that the price will be in the same range as MonoTouch ($400 USD for individual users, and $1,000 for enterprise users).
How is MonoDroid licensed?
MonoDroid is a commercial/proprietary offering that is built on top of the open source Mono project and is licensed on a per-developer basis.
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
As an open source developers, we should develop a new language that will compile down to MonoDroid which will then be able to compile down to Droid. That way, if MS pulls their shenanigans, we can still, er, program for the droid. Um, yeah. Or you could learn Java.
Define "safe".
I've been following software patent issues closely for a long time and I still haven't seen any patent promise that was 100% to my liking. So what the FSF says could also be said about Red Hat's patent promise and many other patent promises and "pledges". The TurboHercules exampled showed how little IBM cares about its patent pledge when it wants to defend its mainframe monopoly. But the worst of all patent licenses is the OIN's patent agreement.
I don't mean to say anyone should trust Microsoft's patent promise blindly, but one should look at the promise in connection with obvious business interests. I can't see how Microsoft would do anything that would run counter to its strategic interest, as a platform company, to maximize developer support.
And I thought my jokes were bad.
IE was purchased by Microsoft. They didn't do some dirty trick, they found a company making a product they liked and purchased them. Not just the rights to their product, the brought on the developers and all that.
DR-DOS wasn't a product that MS ripped off... It was a product that ripped off MS. MS-DOS launched in 1981. DR-DOS launched in 1989 and was version numbed to be the same as MS-DOS. They weren't breaking any laws or anything, but DR-DOS was designed to be their own DOS, compatible with MS-DOS.
Wordperfect lost on its own merits. It was the be-all, end-all of office programs. However the developers failed to keep it up, failed to improve it, and Office eclipsed it. You ever try using it recently (it is still around, still in development)? It is a pile of crap. It lost because there was a superior competing product. You know, how capitalism is supposed to work and all that.
I'm not claiming MS has never done anything underhanded. However people whine and bitch far too much. That a given product failed doesn't mean MS did anything wrong, it may just mean that the product sucked.
Yeah right Google is going to use .NET?
.NET.
You're funny de Icaza and apparently an idiot. Google has been working on it's own language for sometime. They are not going to use some 2nd rate Java knock-off language like
But keep up the comedy routine.
so say I ignore all the controversy and possible patent traps etc., drop my current language of choice, and pick up java or .net, what is the gain?
a mission critical app built on Mono
Look, I know your point is that it's unlikely but still just having those words together in that order made me spit my coffee. New keypad please.
"The ferrets, they're every where I tell you!"
Below are the en.swpat.org analyses. Two of the biggest things in Java's favour are that they have distributed OpenJDK under GPLv2, with the implied patent grant that gives, and Oracle is a member of OIN and there are thus a bunch of GCC and Classpath packages they've promised not to use their patents against.
swpat.org is a publicly editable wiki, help welcome.
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
would you like to operating systems, its 8eaders and has significantly unpleasant ago, many of you in ratio of 5 to flaws in the BSD to foster a gay and
.NET Rocks!
MonoDroid is not open/free software, is a commercial and closed product based on Mono. Novell probably pay MS some royalties for it under their agreements, so Microsoft saying they will not sue and they probably are profit from it is funny
It is ISO/IEC 23270 (http://www.iso.org/iso/catalogue_detail.htm?csnumber=36768). That means it is not something under MS's control and just subject to their promises. Now that's not all of .NET, that is different, but comparing C# to Java and ignoring the face that C# is an open standard, like C++ and Java is not is a bit disingenuous.
It doesn't matter how much they assure that they won't go after free implementations. Without it written in legalese, irrevocable, it's a worthless statement.
What happens in, say, 5 years if/when Microsoft is feeling the pressure of competition? Let's say they're going bankrupt. Sound unlikely? Well, replace 5 years with 20 years. They'll find they have this lovely patent pool full of wonderful words which are potentially worth billions of dollars. Like every single example I can think of in the history of computing since 1980, of course they'll sue using their patents to draw out their death.
The same applies to any of the big names: Google (you're next), Oracle (already doing it), IBM (somehow never died), Sun (via Oracle), for starters. The nuclear weapon analogy holds nicely here too. The software patent mess is Mutually Assured Destruction. But amassing them and then saying "We won't use them"... what happens when your state collapses? Where do they go?
As long as your gnuts don't hurd
capable .NET is.
Forget that it's riding on the most insecure OS on the planet. IF Microsoft, which KNOWS ALL the "undocumented" features of .NET, and it's hand picked partner Aventure, cannot build an app which is both stable and fast, then who can?
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
Everyone knows you cant get pregnant if you're on top while being screwed. Promise!
This is what Microsoft tried to do to Sun to get rid of their Java: Embrace -- Extend -- Extinguish /. is too short to really inform).
This is the sworn expert testimony in court in case Comes vs Microsoft of a mr. Ronald Alepin on 5 january 2007, about Microsoft's strategy in 1995: Groklaw transcript of Comes vs Microsoft document (page down a bit for the transcript).
(please read the whole thing for yourself. this quote here on
It's long ago, but maybe it can still be illuminating to read if you care about Microsoft's plans with their .NET platform and interoperability e.g. with Mono (I personally don't use .NET so I don't care, but your comment "..until Sun sued them for license issues.." nagged me as only partially true :-).
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
There is nothing legally binding in microsoft's statement. Safe until they decide to sue.
Don't get me wrong, Google has a policy of open platform in terms of cooperating with other corps when it strengthens their position (like Flash for instance) and they won't mind C# if it gives them advantages.
Still, it's a risk, same like Java.
You know, if I'd be Google, I'd think about how to come up with something that mitigates this risk, and maybe brings some first mover advantage.
I've not been surprised if they'd come up with their own programming language, that'd just blow the other's away.
They don't seem to be against it, as they do develop new programming languages like the Go programming language.
Don't get me wrong, I don't like Go. The coding style of the standard library is an ugly CamelCase style thing that just makes me want to run away. But it has some very interesting programming paradigms behind it. And Google is using it to some extent already. Maybe they have something even better that they don't tell the world about yet. I mean, that's a very central aspect of their daily bread, I can't imagine them not have thought about it for long and deep hours.
So Microsoft makes this announcement and waits for Java to wither and die because all of the hip Open Source developers defect to .NET.
With Java dead and buried, they roll out the patent guns on .NET.
Extinguish!
The moral of the story is that Free is Free and that large corporations will do what is in their self interest.
Those that have a vested interest in Free (i.e. everyone else) needs to take responsibility for the Free.
So, what do we have?
Stick Men
It doesn't matter how much they assure that they won't go after free implementations. Without it written in legalese, irrevocable, it's a worthless statement.
It is written in legalese. And it is actually quite a bit stronger than a license as it does not require the beneficiary (you) to accept any license agreement. The legal term is estoppel. Here, look it up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estoppel.
From Microsofts community promise (emphasis mine):
Microsoft irrevocably promises not to assert any Microsoft Necessary Claims against you for making, using, selling, offering for sale, importing or distributing any implementation, to the extent it conforms to one of the Covered Specifications, and is compliant with all of the required parts of the mandatory provisions of that specification ("Covered Implementation"), subject to the following: [...]
Read the full text here: http://www.microsoft.com/interop/cp/default.mspx
Now, could that term "Necessary Claims" leave Microsoft with a legal loophole they could wiggle through and sue anyway? IANAL, but it certainly doesn't appear so, as the only way Microsoft could claim that your infringement on one of their patent wasn't "necessary" would be for them to demonstrate what you could have done. Remember, this is a one-sided promise, the burden would be on Microsoft to demonstrate how you would fall outside of the patent coverage.
Now, this promise covers C#, the common language runtime, common type system and core libraries such as collections, P/Invoke etc. It does not cover some of the framework parts higher-up in the stack, such as WPF, WCF, ASP.NET.
It is still unclear to me how implementation of such APIs would be more prone to infringing MS patents than implementing the same functionality on other platforms with other languages. Remember, you cannot patent an API, you can only patent an actual "machine" implementation. Surely if some critical part is covered by a software patent, said patent is language/platform agnostic.
It appears that the problem Google has with Dalvik/Oracle is precisely covered by Microsofts legally binding community promise. See, Google has no interest in implementing a full Java SE. And they had no interest in paying license fees to Sun(now Oracle) for an official JavaME. So they wiggled around and made their own platform in a way which has opened them up to litigation from Oracle.
Had they gone with Mono instead of Dalvik (remember, Dalvik was merely a way to wiggle around Java licenses) there would have been no license fees, and no patent infringement.
Reading slashdot one-liner: (irm http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot).rdf.item | fl title,desc*
Too bad Google didn't choose that as their language of choice.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
But, not all phones have a gig of RAM and a 2GHz cpu.
It is written in legalese. And it is actually quite a bit stronger than a license as it does not require the beneficiary (you) to accept any license agreement.
Hmm, I consider myself corrected. It does not, however, answer what happens if the patents change hands either through bankruptcy or sale. In Sun's case they sold their patents along with the company. To be fair, there was never an explicit legal promise they wouldn't use them.
But that's not how software patents work. In the software patent world, it doesn't matter if you're wrong, right, have a legal claim, invented something, if it's even original, someone else's invention copied outright, or are simply just wasting everyone's time. You just need a pile of cash, lawyers, and a larger pile of cash in the hands of the party you sue. It's a meta-universe they live in. Any loophole will be exploited, and the aim is to either get a huge windfall (if you're a troll) or cross-license agreement (and become a made-company in cartel).
I can easily see Microsoft in 10-20 years getting sold, bankrupted, or whatever (no company lives forever so far). Where do the patents go, and does the promise go with them? Is there just enough doubt that it means they can be trouble anyway?
Keep your Microsoft crap off my phone.
That company has built up so much ill-will that I don't care how "technically inferior" the alternatives are, I don't want anything from Microsoft anywhere near my phone or computers.
I'm happy to wait that extra fraction of a second or do without the 'ooh shiny.'
Ok, thanks. I'm updating the pages now...
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
It does not, however, answer what happens if the patents change hands either through bankruptcy or sale. In Sun's case they sold their patents along with the company. To be fair, there was never an explicit legal promise they wouldn't use them.
IANAL and I'm not intimately familiar with US patent law, *but* it appears to me that any buyer of a patent (whether it be an outright sale or a bankruptcy) would have to accept any grants, agreements and licenses already made for that patent by the seller.
License agreements aren't revoked just because the licensed part changes owner. The new owner will have to honor any agreement affecting the part, and the fact should be reflected in the price/value of transaction. If I buy a patent from someone who has irrevocably licensed it to a certain customer (or everyone) I will have to respect that agreement.
Now, perhaps this community promise isn't the same thing as a patent grant. It appears more to be a waiver (estoppel) of rights to sue. Whether this is some sinister loophole I really can say. But I would expect that it has the same validity as an outright patent grant.
Re: Suns promise on Java: They actually did make such a promise/grant. Only, it came with some (a lot) of preconditions which Google does not meet in this case: The patent grants only covered a full implementation of Java SE *and* only if had also been certified by Sun (i.e. Harmony is also in danger here). Google's Dalvik is not an implementation of Java SE.
I see your point about patents and the legal system. It really doesn't matter if you are right or wrong, all that matters is whether you can convince a jury. Most software patents are overly broad and/or too obvious, at least to people in the industry. But I still fail to see how this makes .NET/Mono more dangerous than other software. If anything, Mono has patent coverage from at least one of the big patent holders in the industry.
Reading slashdot one-liner: (irm http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot).rdf.item | fl title,desc*
I had to look up estoppel. For a split second while the page was loading, I thought it meant, "a legal formulation by which a corporation can assert that no, really, we're not lying to you this time."
I don't believe in time. It's a grand conspiracy designed to sell watches.
A trap? but what can possibly go wrong for MS with mono? Mono will perpetually be playing catch up to whatever set of specifications Microsoft comes up with silverlight. If mono decided to stop following specifications and go solo, then it would have to provide a windows version competing against the guys who own the friggin closed source operating system. Unfeasible. There is no trap. More precisely, the trap has already snapped.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
they are still working on convincing everyone they're not going to sue over people implementing C#, and since this really is just a port of mono to android suing would gain them nothing but hate.
This is a joke. I am joking. Joke joke joke.
It always confuses me that these companies go with java when they could have gone with C/gtk
yeah yeah yeah... garbage collection. but if its really garbage collection shouldn't it just collect the whole damn language?
I see your point about patents and the legal system. It really doesn't matter if you are right or wrong, all that matters is whether you can convince a jury. Most software patents are overly broad and/or too obvious, at least to people in the industry.
Actually, I'd say all that matters is whether you can convince both set of shareholders. They never actually want patent battles to go to jury, and most never get that far. It's pretty much a flip of the coin when it gets that far.
If the potential damage done to your future rating is greater than the cost of a license, you pay the license. It's trial by shareholder. Even then, it's mostly just players positioning themselves to get in on a cartel in a particular industry. Sadly, most shareholders don't understand The Game, and those that do understand it, know that the others don't.
Microsoft irrevocably promises not to assert any Microsoft Necessary Claims against you for making, using, selling, offering for sale, importing or distributing any implementation, to the extent it conforms to one of the Covered Specifications, and is compliant with all of the required parts of the mandatory provisions of that specification ("Covered Implementation")
As explained in many places on the web, this "Microsoft will not sue you" is very different from actually granting a license. Even if this promise is irrevocable and perpetual. For example, Microsoft could sell off one of the relevant patents to a proxy agent, which would then sue anyone and everyone (but Microsoft). If you think that's a crazy idea, then (1) there are good reasons to suspect this or very close to it happened with Microsoft and SCO, and (2) just the other day we saw Paul Allen sue everybody in tech - but Microsoft, which led many to suspect this was Microsoft starting a patent war by proxy (so it can't be sued back. Paul Allen is a non practicing entity at this point, so nothing to sue him over).
This is one of many reasons why tools like Illumination Software Creator are so important. If you have a high level language (in that case a fully visual one) that generates native code for any given platform (Java + Android API for Android apps, etc.) then whenever a company decides to sue someone for using an API/Language/etc it becomes easy to jump to another platform (or another api/language on the same platform) from the same project files.
I am hopelessly confused. Why are developers even using .Net or Java? I could never understand why these langauges are some much "better" than Python or Perl or anything else for that matter. Why do devs flock to C# and Java? Hell if I know.
Mono: Don't you catch it. Ask a teen. They all know about mono. I knew a guy who's girlfriend got mono. He didn't have it, but a guy on the football team had it. He asked her how she got it. She told him: "We were rehearsing for a school play." Did you kiss him? Did you kiss him? It pretty much ended it between them. In a way he was happy that she got mono, but after he found out that she had it, he never ever showed any symptoms at all. Its Mono, man! Don't you catch it!
Today from the company that won't sue over non sense patents.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703294904575385241453119382.html#ixzz0xpmhujQQ
.
Perhaps you should rely less on Wikipedia and more on actual history. IBM did not believe that the desktop would take off, and so partnered with a company that wound up (deliberately) stabbing them in the back.
OS/2 was a superior product, but did not have the marketing strength (within IBM) to push it. Microsoft is a marketing giant, not a coding giant. How else can you explain a bug that showed up in IE4 (fixed within 24 hours), again in IE5 (same bug, same fix - after IE4 fix was released - same timeframe also), again in IE6 (you get the point).
Think someone did not say hey, I've seen this one before?
And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.
John 8:32(King James Version)
Managed C++ is pretty cool stuff. You should try it. It's really not much different from vanilla C++ - the extensions required for CLR aren't any more complex than what you already do with STL.
C# is an awesome language to develop in. You can write code quickly that Just Works(tm). If C# doesn't do something for you automatically, just drop in a .dll or COM object and you're good to go. It really couldn't be easier.
Say all you want about how the CLR and its philosophy sucks, but they're about the best thing out there right now - and I should know, since I work on large projects in multiple programming environments for a living.